It’s 2015 so congratulations to the NFL for catching up with the rest of the online world. Today the league announced a YouTube channel featuring game clips, interviews and some of their fantasy football content in a large deal with Google. The search service will pay the NFL millions of dollars up front for the video and hope to recoup some of that through ad sales.
Mr. Schroeder said the league plans to actively program the YouTube channel on a daily basis. Plus, game clips will also be posted to the channel as games are being played throughout the season–starting with this Sunday’s championship matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots. The clips will carry messaging urging fans to tune in to the NFL games on TV
Unfortunately, as the Wall Street Journal notes, old clips of games won’t be made available. Additionally, the channel won’t allow videos to embed on other sites. Great.
Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s Senior Vice President, Media Strategy, Business Development & Sales (that title is 10 words too long) weighs in.
The NFL isn’t exactly letting its valuable content run freely all over the Web. In fact, unlike most YouTube videos, other websites won’t be able to embed clips from the NFL channel. “We like to control where our content goes,” said Mr. Schroeder.
So instead of sharing NFL.com clips to Facebook, you’ll be sharing YouTube ones. And the rich keep getting richer.
